After a tsunami struck the nuclear power plant in the Fukushima prefecture in 2011, the author became the only foreign newsman allowed to enter the danger zone on Friday to witness the cleanup drive of the Japanese government.
The shuttered facility in the Tohoku region on the island of Honshu has been off limits to residents because of radiation hazards.
Hitosho Aoki, from Decontamination Information Center of the Ministry of Environment in Fukushima City briefed the visitors on efforts to contain the damage.
The Japanese government has allocated around 1 trillion yen that includes the cost of removal, transport and safe storage of radiation-contaminated soil in a reserved location, he said.
We were shown the uninhabited area near the abandoned train that served as evacuation site after radiation levels near the plant peaked at 400 mSv/h (millisieverts per hour) after an earthquake triggered a tsunami on March 11, 2011.
On Friday, the reading from the millisieverts survey meters registered between 6 to 8 (millisieverts per hour). The average dose per person from all sources is about 6 millisievert per year, the technical staff said.
The global average human exposure to artificial radiation is 0.6 mSv/a year, primarily from medical imaging but can range up to 3 mSv per year.
A typical chest x-ray delivers 0.02 mSv (2 mrem) of effective dose. A dental x-ray delivers a dose of 5 to 10 µSv.
In comparison, the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986 yielded 10 to 50 mSv over 20 years for the inhabitants in the contaminated zone, with most of the dose received in the first years after the disaster.
Although radiation may cause cancers at high doses and high dose rates, currently there are no data to establish unequivocally the occurrence of cancer following exposure to low doses and dose rates – below about 100 mSv, according to Aoki’s staff.
Sources taken from United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s said the effects of low doses of radiation, if any, would occur at the cell level, and thus changes may not be observed usually 5-20 years after exposure.
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